Cumberland Association Annual Meeting

HIGH STREET CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH                                                  106 Pleasant Street, AUBURN

2 pm     Sunday, October 25

Find Map Here                See Official Call to Meeting Here

           AGENDA and ANNUAL REPORTS HERE

Pastors, please forward these to your delegates.  Rev. Kelli Whitman, Clerk, will have a few hard copies at the meeting on October 25th, but it will be helpful if folks bring a copy or have access to them digitally.
And,you are encouraged to bring an item that represents part of the history of your church.   This could be a picture, a bulletin, a plaque, a communion set, etc.  We will be placing these in the window sills of the Sanctuary at High Street as we honor our past and look ahead at all the “new things” to come!

Like to sing?  A Volunteer Association Choir will be assembled — with rehearsal at 1 pm that day!  The anthem will be Come Build a Church, by Ken Medema.    If you’d like to sing, please contact John Terison ( jtkterison@gmail.com ) for a copy for practicing at home.  Here’s a video of another choir singing the anthem;  you can sing along!

The Maine School of Ministry (MESOM)

Upcoming Courses from MESOM

Please register by December 8th for January Term:

  • United Church of Christ History, Polity and Theology – Instructor Shernell Edney is back to host this intensive course five Saturdays in a row, Jan 9 through Feb 6 on Zoom (9:00-2:00).

Registration will begin shortly for Spring Semester 2027 MESOM classes:

  • Moments in Christian History Around the World – with Dr. Leah Rumsey
  • Gender and End Times: Hard Questions in the New Testament – with Dr. Kelsey Wallace

Tuition fee is $375 per semester class. Some partial scholarships are available. Please email Dean Malcolm Himschoot to make your request: mhimschoot@maineucc.org. 

REGISTER NOW!

2026 Fellowship Dues Rates and IRS Mileage Rates

2026 Fellowship Dues for the Maine Conference will be $20.43/member.   Conference Dues fluctuate year to year by the federally-established COLA rate, unless changed by special vote of the Conference at Annual Meeting.  

2026 Fellowship Dues for the Cumberland Association are  $2.10/member.  (Many churches do add Conference and Association Dues together to make one line item for their budgets, but we want you to know how the dues are actually assessed.)

2026 Fellowship Dues for each church are calculated on the number of members reported as of December 31, 2025.  Membership MUST be reported to the UCC via the UCC Data Hub by each church.  If you do not file your statistics with the UCC data hub, your church’s dues will be calculated on the most recent statistics you have filed on the Data Hub.  Data Hub reporting is done in January or February each year.

2026 DUES for both Association and Conference will be invoiced to churches in the Spring, and are due May 15th.  

Debra DeLong is our Cumberland Association Treasurer. All Maine Conference and Cumberland Association dues  (also Scholarship Fund donations) should be sent to Deb at her address -152 Puritan Drive, Westbrook, ME 04092. Her email address is djgdelong@gmail.com. Checks should still be made payable to the Cumberland Association and mailed to Deb’s home address.  She then forwards the Conference Dues to the Conference. 

For 2026, the standard mileage rate for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) is 72.5 cents per mile for business miles driven.  The tax-deductible mileage rate for volunteers (not employees) driving in service of charitable organizations:  $.14/mile (set by federal statute, not the IRS, and does not change annually).